Share this:

Like this:

The rolling back of equality started way before 2010. Attacking capacities to mother and care through the benefit system has been the stock response every time policy makers have been faced with changing demographics, changing family forms, and impact of credit based growth and financial instability, for a long long time. Noone to stop it given fossilised left wing cultures occupy our trade unions and and the left wing press deided we dont need democracy because they need media hierarchies.

Margaret Thatcher shat herself at the numbers of independent mothers that were beginning to be evident in the 1980s and made independent mothers objects of disgust. A blueprint that has been followed religiously so we could pretend that welfare benefits were about labour market activity and not the ability to provide for your kids outside marriage.

Single mothers an expression of anxiety as the twentieth century saw the biggest single reorganisation of the family in human histroy. Marriage evolving didn’t make the labour of child rearing, bearing, and eldercare unnecessary.

With every social work scandal and child death with neo liberalism and managerialism at its root, mothers have disappeared been removed in child protection investigations. Since Baby P was used by Ed Balls to appease Rupert Murdoch, consideration of deliberately created maternal poverty and social context from child protection investigations has been made concrete and care applications have gone through the roof.

The austerity the radical left exploited to build careers targeted very specifically social care, child protection and benefits mothers needed. The services that allowed women to leave abuse when a man was trying to kill them and hurt their kids. Obviously this was not a concern to the radical left, because who at Wadham college needs these things?

Economics decided the best way to deal with a financial crisis was to remove the ability of women to leave abusive households, and policy makers made sure child protection was used to punish them with removal of their kids if they were victims of domestic abuse. Women, if you could just pay for the deficit lie at the end of a fist.

Adoption placed at the heart of child protection. Our ageing population problems solved by creation of a female labour market for social care that turned care workers into robots with less free time than Amazon distribution centre workers. Working class women had the means to protect themselves from abuse removed so their children could be taken for failing to protect them and provide for them and the benefits system can compel them into slave labour as soon as they experience the motherhood pay penalty..

Working class women can provide the cheap labour for the care industry, the childcare and domestic labour so middle class women get equality, fuck men for money, and make babies for middle class households. The kids who go into a care system guaranteed to abuse them can grow up to make babies for middle class families of the future. Incubators, sex workers, and domestic slaves.

What is the ‘radical’ feminist response. Consumer sovereignty in the sex industry, could you not mention reproductive capacities as at the core of gender inequality, if you mention your biology as part of your womanhood some of Laurie Penny’s friends will target and threaten you and end your career cos its a hate crime. Could you just do the unpaid labour quietly and hand your kids over to nice middle class couples who can teach them to be better. By the way we’d like to liquidate the benefits system to pay for a UBI system so our posh mates get a nominal amount of money they don’t need. Working class women won’t mind paying for posh kids to have the ‘Universal’ Basic Income.

‘Radical’ feminism. Working class women can be incubators, sex workers, and manage the fragile identities of posh feminists and trans activists, and do all the domestic and slave caring labour quietly. Feminism is now about everyone remembering Laurie Penny’s pronouns so please don’t mention what gender actually means.

Feminism is about everyone managing the fragile identities of those whose lives are not bound by gender. Gender is a self realisable truth anyone can have fun with except women, and could poor women just be quiet and provide the babies, the sex and the drudge labour. Male violence is no longer a thing. This is the only way that everyone else can be liberated to fully automated luxury communism.

Who knew reading gender theory could turn ‘radical’ feminism into something more akin to an abusive marriage. Thank god austerity happened though or this generation of lefty poppets may not have gotten media careers.

Share this:

Like this:

1- Everything you do and say on social media is visible. Not just invidually but as a culture. Creating a visible echochamber in a chatroom is not the same as winning over voters. See GE2010 and 2015.

2- Every person you speak to on Twitter is a potential Labour voter. As you are not entitled to their vote, it is best not to abuse them for falling outside your political identity and to remember you need them not to remember your abuse when they see that Labour box on a ballot slip. That will lose you a vote you need.

3- You need a party structure that allows you to thrash out ideological differences and allows ideas to evolve in response to changing context. You cannot play out fixed factional conflicts in a chatroom where the electorate are watching you.

4- If you are going to have factional conflict playing out live on twitter, using a hashtag, it is best that at least ONE of those factions has a) public support b) an economic and social policy position that actually addresses our current crisis c) you still need to remember you are doing this publicly.

5- Pathologising dissent when your view is only held by a few thousand people in a ccountry of 64million people, demonstrates something about you. Something you don’t want voters to know. Something that will make them refuse to vote for you.

6- You need to remember that Twitter is not the electorate. Sometimes just having the argument on twitter is a bad idea. Getting agreement on twitter is easy but you may be demonstrating cultural problems which scare people and mean they won’t vote for you.

7- If you think your party identity gives you the right to abuse peope on the internet, you might want to see someone. But at the very least understand that when you do that publicly you are telling voters you are a risk and a threat and not a possible solution they may vote for.

8- Dont confuse twitter with the real world. It just cost you an election and it will cost you another

Share this:

Like this:

Though the idea of a basic income is far from mainstream, it has had astonishingly broad support’

Last week, I pondered how society should protect or compensate people whose jobs have been lost to the forces of globalisation or technological change. I did not, however, discuss the most obvious idea of all: that we should simply give people money — a basic income for everyone, regardless of what they do or what they need. It’s the ultimate social safety net.

For an idea that is so far from mainstream political practice, the payment of a basic income has had astonishingly broad support, from Martin Luther King Jr to Milton Friedman. It’s on the lips of the policy wonk community too: the Freakonomics podcast recently devoted an episode to the case for a universal basic income. The Royal Society for Arts, a venerable British think-tank, has published a report enthusiastically supporting the idea. Dutch journalist Rutger Bregman is just as keen, as outlined in his recent, eloquent book Utopia for Realists.

Policy experiments are also on the way. The charity GiveDirectly has just announced plans to run a randomised trial in which 6,000 Kenyans will receive a basic income for more than a decade. Various Silicon Valley types — with one eye on the looming Robot Job Apocalypse — are making serious-sounding noises about running experiments too. Pilots are planned in Canada and Finland, and the Swiss have a referendum on the topic in June.

Could a basic income really work? The answer is yes. But the plan may be more painful than some of its advocates are willing to admit.

First, let’s establish what we’re talking about. A universal basic income is a cash payment from the state, paid to everyone unconditionally. For the sake of being concrete, let’s call it £10 a day. That seems like a lot of money to be giving to absolutely everyone, but it’s within the bounds of reason. Such a payment would cost £234bn a year across 64 million UK residents, so it could be largely paid for by scrapping all social security spending, which is £217bn.

There are lots of other proposals that one might call a basic income. Leftwing advocates might want far more than £10 a day but that would require a huge expansion of the state, with much higher taxes. The more libertarian proponents of the idea might also approve of a higher basic income, in exchange for a rolling back of state-provided services. Privatising the entire health and education system in the UK would free up £240bn, easily enough to double the basic income to £20 a day for every man, woman and child. But that money would need to cover school fees and medical bills.

All this is within the bounds of affordability. But is it desirable? Here are two big question marks over the idea.

The first is whether people would simply stop working. Several large experiments conducted in the US and Canada in the late 1970s and early 1980s suggest that a minimum income would encourage people to reduce their hours a little. If such slacking-off undermined the tax base, the entire project could become both economically and politically unsustainable.

But the tax base is probably safe enough, because the people who might be tempted to quit work and live on £10 a day are not the people whose taxes pay for most state spending. In the UK, the richest 15 per cent of taxpayers — people who pay at least some tax at the 40 per cent rate — supply about two-thirds of income tax revenue. Few of these people are likely to find the basic income a tempting inducement to leave the labour force.

In some cases, we might celebrate a decision to stop work. Some people volunteer; others care for children or relatives; some might use the income to fund themselves as they stay in education or retrain. Some, alas, might use the money to stay alive as they write poetry.

The second objection is more worrying: if the welfare state is to be replaced by a basic income, it will provide far too little for some. A tenner a day is less than half the new UK state pension, so it’s hard to imagine pensioners embracing the idea with much gusto.

On the other hand, if the basic income is to be supplemented by a raft of special cases — people with disabilities, people with expensive rent, people who are elderly — then it may become as complex as the tangle of benefit entitlements it aims to replace, or hugely expensive, or both.

Andrew Hood of the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that compared with current welfare benefits, a basic income would “either be a lot less generous or a lot more expensive”. Take your pick.

In the end, the idea appeals to three types of people: those who are comfortable with a dramatic increase in the size of the state, those who are willing to see needy people lose large sums relative to the status quo, and those who can’t add up.

A basic income makes perfect sense once we arrive at an economy where millions work for low wages while automation produces a bountiful economy all around them. The debate turns on whether that world has already arrived.